Laravel stores the files accessible by PHP-FPM and NGINX in the public folder, not the root of the Laravel project. Make sure you point the root to the correct directory, otherwise you could expose your configuration files.
We set a location block (location ~ \.php$) so that only PHP files are compiled by our PHP-FPM configuration. This means that all other files (for example, CSS stylesheets) are served directly by NGINX for the greatest efficiency.